Video: Overview of social computing in SharePoint Server 2013

Summary: View a video of enterprise social computing and collaboration in SharePoint 2013, including My Sites, Community Sites, and microblogging.

In this video, Bill Baer, SharePoint Senior Product Marketing Manager, provides an overview of the benefits and value that social computing and collaboration bring to the enterprise. He also introduces the key improvements to the social and collaboration features in SharePoint Server 2013.

SharePoint Server provides features and functionality to support the following social computing and collaboration pillars in the enterprise:

Connecting people By connecting people, you reduce employee isolation and give employees a voice to collaborate with both peers and executives. Employees can connect with others who have common interests, and create networks of people who share common goals across an organization instead of within a particular workgroup.

Managing knowledge Social computing and collaboration features and functionality provide an approachable, less formal means of communication in the enterprise. For example, you can use blogs or wikis to capture more impromptu or casual information that doesn’t belong in formal documents or other resources in the organization. It reduces clutter, and creates transparent communities of persisted information.

Collaborating and sharing information Technology now provides ways for people to interact in a traditional computing scenario in much the same way they interact with others in real life. Employees find and discover other people in ways that are familiar to them, such as informal communications, conversations, and contributions.

Even though the social computing journey started in SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2013 represents a further commitment to social computing and collaboration by bringing familiar social experiences to the platform.

My Sites are improved to include new, modern experiences such as microblogging, which is the basis of the new feeds infrastructure that supports likes, hash tags, mentions, and the ability to follow content, people, and other sites. My Sites are the gateway to the information you’re interested in and to the people that you want to interact with. The content that you store in your My Site is yours until you decide to share it, and with whom to share it.

Community Sites are new in SharePoint Server 2013. They provide a forum experience that enables people to discuss common interests. Community Sites provide features to organize discussions, moderate conversations, and promote participation of members through incentives such as reputation points, gifted badges, likes, and best replies. These features help people share and locate knowledge through persistent, searchable information.

SharePoint Server 2013 can be considered a social renaissance for the enterprise, bringing together information and people, the right way, at the right time, and in the right place.